Summer 1998

�Tis a brave master;
Let it have scope:
Follow it utterly,
Hope beyond hope:
High and more high
And dives into noon,
With wing unspent,
Untold intent;
But it is a god
Knows its own path
And the outlets of the sky.

T�was never for the mean;
It requireth courage stout,
Souls above doubt,
Valor unbending,
It will reward,-
They shall return
More than they were,
And ever ascending.

Leave all for love;
Yet, hear me, yet,
One word more of thy heart behoved,
One pulse more of firm endeavor,-
Keep thee today,
Tomorrow, forever,
Free as an Arab
Of thy beloved.

Cling with life to the maid;
But when the surprise,
First vague shadow of surmise
Flits across her bosom young
Of a joy apart from thee,
Free be she, fancy free;
Nor thou detain her vesture�s hem,
Nor the palest rose she flung
from her summer diadem.

Though thou lovest her as thyself
As a self of purer clay,
Though her parting dims the day
Stealing grace from all alive
Heartily know,
When half gods go,
The gods arrive.

That�s Emerson.

QUESTION: Did you come to Emerson through the journal?

OLDS: Through that poem. I went to a lecture in New York City when I was like 19, and Leslie Fiedler cited that poem. And I�d been waiting to hear that poem. I would say that poem to myself so when it came to think of whose work I wanted to look at so close and dwell with--something about him too, something about his life. He just seemed like a fun person.

QUESTION: I wanted to ask you about the process when you wrote the book, The Father. Did you find it--this is a leading question--did you find it healing? Did you find that some forgiveness issues came up? I�m just thinking it must have been a really tough piece to write. Was there some sort of reward beyond what is normal in writing poems?

QUESTION: Do you want to describe the book The Father for those who may not have read it?

OLDS: Well, it�s a book of poems. The point of view is a daughter. The subject is a father, who is dying and then who has died, and then the last third of the book has poems written the ten years or so after that death. So it�s kind of like a story. I have tried writing poems. I have tried not writing poems. And I find not writing poems to be much harder than writing them. When one is holding something and one doesn�t bring it forth, I find that really hard. The other is by comparison fun, fun. I think art is great fun, joy and pleasure. It�s fun to make something. It just seems to me a kind of amazing thing to be as if one were free, as if one were allowed to sit down and try to say what really seems true, to describe or to put into words something one has seen or heard. What an amazing thing, to have time to do that, to have even a half an hour a day to do that. It just strikes me as amazing, fantastic. It can be painful and all of that. I don�t think I knew what I was going to say ever when I would sit down to write. I did not think that I was writing a book. I was just writing a poem on a particular day. There was so much going on in terms of language, experience, vision, point of view, trying to be accurate. It�s sort of gripping, kind of like if we were great basketball players, would we be thinking theory while we were playing? I wouldn�t be. Even when I tried to play basketball, it went so slowly that there would have been time to think, but I didn�t. So I would say I suppose I have a feeling to try and make a work of art in honor of another person, even if it�s kind of tough. Well, I guess, I always thought I wouldn�t mind if that would have been about me. So it seems to me it�s like recognizing someone and paying attention to them and saying yes, you existed or yes, you mattered. In other words, we write about stuff we care about very much. I think that�s when our writing works a little better. I think I�ve written a lot of stuff that has not cured me or made me understand my life. When I was younger, I thought that I was probably cured and that I probably understood. That doesn�t mean that young people think that and older people are right. It just meant that I didn�t get it. I think it�s possible for some of us to make some kind of art and not see what we�re saying or understand it. In The Father there�s a poem I read now sometimes at readings. It�s about the father paddling this boat across the River Styx. At the end of this poem the speaker is saying when I die, I know this father figure will come pick me up and row me over. This is all the speaker wants, just to spend eternity in some grave with this father. It�s a very sincere poem. I read it and I think, that is really sick, but I believe it. It seemed very sincere. And I don�t hate it. But that just came into my mind as an illustration that we write maybe where we are. Is it unhealing not to write when we have a poem inside? I think so. But I want the poem to work. Whether I get well or not is something else. I want the poem to not be false. I want the poem to not have to carry any stones in its pocket for my sake, that are my stones to carry. I want it to be free as it could be.

QUESTION: Just as long as we�re talking about the subject, you�ve also written about your children. You�re one of the few writers as you mentioned, who�s actually constantly devoted your work to your children. And I wonder if you could comment on that.

OLDS: Well, one thing that comes to my mind is when I saw that I was having this good fortune, that I had not expected, of being read, I went back and took the names [of my children, and others] out of the books. I don�t know what I�d been thinking. Well, I hadn�t been thinking. People would say, you�re brave. And I�d think, oh, good, because I know that I am a complete chicken. Later I realized I was kind of a sociopath. It wasn�t really brave. It was that I didn�t get it about not putting real names in the poems. And the other people who got it were saying, oh, I wish I could do that and I�d say oh, don�t worry, maybe when you�re older. They were moral people. It just took me a little longer to understand these things, so I would not definitely call my own example an ideal. I�ve been much more careful in the last years. At the same time there is a side of me which feels that, as far as I know, no serious or terrible harm has been done. There�s a part of me that sneakily--this is the sociopath in me--is glad that I didn�t know not to, so as to be thorough open, especially in poems with sexuality and children. If I had been scared of myself, I wouldn�t have published much. I didn�t know to be scared of myself because I didn�t have a clear enough vision of those things. I wrote as if free. I�m not totally sorry about that. There are just edges of it that I change, change lines, take things out. So I want to take the chance now to say, it�s funny how no one I could hear was saying to me, are you sure this is completely the right thing to do? Before I just heard, this is wonderful, or you are a monster which they didn�t say in a way that I could hear.

QUESTION: Could you describe your writing process?

OLDS: I think that I see, that I become aware that I am hearing the tip of the ear of a poem below where I can see. I see this faint triangle or I hear it. So I�ll write it on my hand. [She �writes� on her palm with her finger.] Now I�ll remember that. I write all over again. And they have the same images that are weird images, too. So, ok it�s a poem. Then, when it�s quiet and I�m alone, which could be on a train or a bus--not a subway, it�s too short of a ride--then I start. Maybe with my eyes closed. Actually I guess my eyes are open, but I�m in a state. I don�t want to be too critical but I do want to steer it enough the right way that I don�t get all the wrong words, all the wrong sounds, and then I�m going to be going on from those sounds to other sounds. So I just try not to be false and not to push. And then, I don�t look at it for at the worst, ten years, at the best, a week or two, unless it won�t let me go. Then I think, that�s fake, that�s not fake, and then I go back. I hate to go back, but then I look at it--it�s not so good. If I just write it and leave I think, ahhhh, not always but sometimes, then I feel sort of cheerful for the rest of the day and that�s very exciting. So then I�ll type it up and then I�ll try to take out�I figured this out once what I try to take out�self-pity and adjectives. There�s always too much of those two things in my poems. I also try to make the line breaks for the first four lines. This is something Philip Levine told me. He said, you know, not all of us grew up in that church, Sharon, where it goes da-dah da-dah da-dah da-dah so we don�t understand what you�re doing when you start undoing that from the very beginning. Couldn�t you just give us the first four lines in da-dah da-dah da-dah da-dah and then once it�s established then we could start cutting it up. So I type up not very many of the poems that I write. I mean, I write a lot more than I type up. I read them to see if they�re worth typing up. So often they aren�t. That�s kind of it. Then I�ll read them. I�ll read always at least one new poem at a reading, sometimes more, and then I�ll see how it sounds. Those books where you can read about people�s process are so interesting because everyone�s process is so startlingly different. Part of when I was walking down those steps at Columbia had to do with me being tired of feeling that my process, which wasn�t just like the ones I heard about, had to be wrong for that reason.

QUESTION: Sharon, you may have just answered this question. But the poem, "The Moment the Two Worlds Meet" I was just curious how that came to be?

OLDS: How does that start?

QUESTION: It starts "That�s the moment I always think of--when the slick, whole body comes out of me, . . ." If you�d like to read it--

OLDS: Oh, no, no thank you. It sounds over-written to me. That�s why I�m saying "slick, whole body." Find out who wrote that poem! Probably I thought that that�s the moment I always think of. I just probably thought about life. Do you mean like that? I probably thought of that moment, and then I thought I always think of that moment and then I was probably thinking, when that moment begins you�re in one universe and then when that moment is over we�re all here. What happens between then was a mystery to me a mystery about reality in a way. So I just started meditating on it. To me �slick, whole� sounds, at this point in my life, a little bold. It just sounds so bold. But maybe you don�t mean that at all in terms of how I did it?

QUESTION: This is the first time I read it and it just struck me. How did she do this? I mean, I understood. I�m not a mother. I just didn�t have the experience, but I understood.

OLDS: It�s weird to me. In a way, that poem implies a gentle reader, doesn�t it? There�s a way in which it just starts talking out of an ordinary life as if to another person who doesn�t mind reading it, right? It�s like a confiding in a way. I guess it just would sound totally sentimental to say, well, I thought you were there somewhere? And yet I know that feeling in other people�s poems. If I were to read a poem of yours and I would feel the connection with it, then you would have been right when you wrote it that there was someone there, which had been me. In other words, we aren�t misunderstanding the nature of the human when we think that we want to hear each other, that we�re willing to hear each other, that we need to hear each other, that we�re lonesome. We want to know what experiences we haven�t had and what experiences we have had. Or what the source would be of my thinking that I could just sit down and do that. Well, I had given up poetry. I had quit. I wasn�t going to do that. I was just going to write my own stuff and I didn�t care if it was bad. I�d had it with that other thing. You know, one�s life always belonging to the others on their terms.

QUESTION: While you�re here, can you just define for yourself what is poetry?

OLDS: I can�t. I couldn�t for the longest time. All I would say was, no one knows. No generation knows because then the next generation, the next writers come along and it�s different from what it was before. So I felt safe in saying, no one knows. But then I began to notice poetry as a spoken art, not as a read art. Obviously it�s both, and both are precious. I feel a very strong connection to the hearing, and the seeing seems to take care of itself. We are in such a seeing world. So what is poetry? Maybe it is what happens when someone in our species talks about what most matters to them. Maybe a rhythmic speech begins. Love, death, sex, birth, grief, rage, tribal, individual, whatever. When we utter in whatever language--every group of people has had poetry, there�s never been a group without it--that rhythmical utterance. Now why rhythmical when caring the most? Well, probably it�s just in our nature because of the natural rhythms of our heart and our lungs. There are something like seventeen bodily rhythms which we have that we mostly don�t notice. But we are rhythmic beings. I think it�s because we are rhythmic, and when we care most we utter in rhythm and then when we put it on the page, it comes out in these lines. The rhythm of the ear with a slight stopping or not comes out in shapes on the page.

QUESTION: Can you talk about your experience and what you do in Goldwater Hospital?

OLDS: When I was teaching there, in the beginning, we had many guests�Robert Stone, and Allen Ginsberg, a different guest every week�and I would just ask them to talk about becoming a writer. Many of the people in the hospital, before they were paralyzed were musicians or bankers. They did all these other things. It�s a cross-section of New York City people who were doing all kinds of other things beforehand. Now their ability, their capacity for expression in life and in art has been severely limited and so poetry and memoir and fiction are often ways of expressing that. There�s no difference really in the workshop except for the mechanics of the communication--the laser beam wand on the forehead, the typewriter, the cardboard alphabet card. I as the helper, the scribe, hold the alphabet card and point to the letters until the writer raises her eyes to show me that that�s the letter, the first letter of the first word, of the first line, of the poem. That�s when the computers are down, which is most of the time. There are also those who type with mouth sticks. But for me the experience of transcribing for someone who touches a large alphabet card with a toe to spell, or does eyes up, or one of those other methods of hitting a word on a board, was a big powerful experience. It�s like the chase. It�s like going hunting together. It�s so powerful and so unnerving because I wasn�t so good at. But it wasn�t something that was worth me apologizing for every three seconds because it was not as if we had enough time for that. Taking it on as a new task was hard to do. The writers there were very patient. Once I got better at it, I�d be able to guess part way ahead in a word when we�d have a few of the letters. It was just extremely exciting and wonderful. There is a difference between that workshop and others that I�ve been in. There is no self-pity in the writing at Goldwater which is almost eerie in a way. There is honesty about what it�s like, but there�s no excess. There�s no complaining even though there�s directness. I began to think of self-pity in my own writing, for instance, as kind of a luxury that just means that someone is not in extremely hard times. That was very startling to me. I�ve learned so much from being there and now that the writers from NYU go there. They come back on Tuesdays and the whole creative writing program is just excited. People are saying, how was it? Or someone is saying, Jody wrote this poem! People who aren�t involved in it are excited so the connection in the community is very important and wonderful. These are the things that come to mind.

QUESTION: I wonder if you could talk a little about your conception of the voice, your construction of the point of view. I mean you were talking a few minutes ago about The Father and about the father and the daughter in there.

OLDS: I say �apparently personal� as much for the sake of the writers that I�m working with at Goldwater and at NYU or the places where I go and do intensive weekend teaching so that we will all feel as free as possible to write the poems that come to us. Say we were writing together, say we gathered every week and read each other a poem. If we all were absolutely convinced and couldn�t have our minds changed that anything that anyone in this room brought in that had an �I� in it was absolutely autobiography, that everything in it purely happened to them, I think it wouldn�t be as good. I think we wouldn�t feel as free to bring in things that were on an edge, or things that were over the edge. If we acknowledge that, we can talk about the speaker of the poem, and not say, we know this isn�t true. That is, we are saying we don�t know that this is literally true every single moment. Now if I�m going into a high school and someone is saying should I write about what I experienced and I really care about, or should I make stuff up? Well, when I�m there then I will say, it sounds to me like it would be stronger to write about something you really care about instead of making stuff up. And I�ll say to them, unfortunately, I�ve taken a vow to not talk about this part of my own work. So I can�t actually come out and say, I write about what I care about the most and I don�t make things up. I can�t say that because I�ve taken a vow to try and separate a little. But then I think of what Muriel Rukeyser said, write about what they tell you to forget; write about what they tell you to forget, write about what they tell you to forget. Those are three lines from her poem. Now how is each one of us going to work that out in relation to courage and sociopathy protection of others, and loyalty and singing and freedom and not too much freedom? Well, this is one of the huge tasks of every writer�s life-- trial and error, error and trial--and there�s not one answer that�s right. I like the phrase �apparently personal� because it says, when you read me your poem, I am not going to assume that every word in it is literally true. And I�m going to talk about my poems in the same way. I�m going to say, the speaker, because then I feel free in what I do. I wish for the writers whom I know to be free, to feel free within that world because I think they will also be taking care. Most people take much better care of their muses than I have, so I�m not so worried about that. It�s a part of the world of art, I think. The imagination, the imaginary imagination.

QUESTION: I do want to ask you something and you can tell me if you feel this may be too personal an issue. You had brought this up yourself in a conversation we had had. It shocked me. You had said that some people had reacted to your poetry as pornographic.

OLDS: Oh, right. I have been told that there are critics who have called my work pornographic. These things happen. But when you and I were talking, something made me realize that I�d taken that more to heart than I realized. When I first heard that I was shocked and then I was just too shocked to even think about it. I didn�t think about it for a year. Then I thought I should at least think what is pornography? So I thought pornography is stuff written about sex, or whatever, that�s meant to be arousing, that�s it. And perhaps it�s also meant to be sold for the purposes of being arousing and then the gain of the arousal goes to the pornography creator who can then out and buy, say, chocolates. You see where my eros is located this afternoon. And I thought oh, well this is just not pornography. But then I thought well, maybe it is for some people and not for others. Isn�t the purpose of my writing to shock? I have never felt that, but then when I heard "slick, whole," it sounded too bold to me so I think my writings probably had a flaw--excessive boldness, counterphobic boldness, I would say. And therefore it�s been just a little over the edge. But when you�re writing pornography, are you thinking about the stranger having their experience of what you�re writing? Well, in that case no. It�s not even an erotic experience for me to write love poems, that are sexual love poems. Is that safe to say? It�s an experience, it�s probably a great erotic weakness for me, but I think it�s an experience that has to do with art. What if everything about life, even those things which in the church in which I was raised were despised, could be made into art? What if art could be for anything? Hey, that�s a thought. So then I decided I wasn�t going to be that upset. But then when you and I spoke, I guess I felt as if being looked at that way had placed me as a kind of permanent outlaw.

QUESTION: Do you still teach at the Omega Institute and what is that like?

OLDS: I do four things a year besides NYU and Goldwater. One is Omega Institute which is a beautiful place that used to be a Yiddish summer camp for New York City with these wonderful bungalows on stilts and fantastic food. We gather together and write brand new first drafts. In a weekend we do three. When I work that way, I am happy because we�re all in the same boat. We�re writing first drafts together; we�re not working on revision, which of course at NYU is what we do a lot. We�re just doing this new stuff and hearing each other. In the wilderness, there�s no Xerox machine and in fact I now work at Omega and Esalen with no Xerox machine. The poems are read by the poet and then the copies are passed around. It�s very dear to me to hear for the first time the voice of a poet rather than hear and read at the same time, which to me is a mumbling of senses. For me it�s the all doing it together and all influencing each other like mad and inspiring each other to leap ahead and do things that we haven�t tried before with our promise being that we will not criticize each other during that time. Whatever anyone goes for we�ll be there for. Even if we�re scared because we usually are, but we�re all in it together. There we are. Thank you.

Sharon Olds, State Poet
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Sharon Olds

Question & Answer following Reading, January 29, 1998

Question: Is there a point in your writing where you decide that a section for a book is done?

OLDS: The Wellspring has that patterning of a kind of chronology of a life. Was there a point in writing it when I decided to make it that way? Unlike most poets I don�t write books. I write individual poems. I don�t think about books. And then when I look at a year, two years, three years, work, I try to see what I think the best poems are. Whatever they�re about I try to put the best ones in a book, and if it ends up having no theme, that�s too bad. That�s just the way I work. With these things it�s so individual. My first book ended up with obvious themes. Well, the way that happened was I tried to disguise those themes, (this was a long time ago). I wanted it not to seem like a woman�s book, as if that, at that time, seemed to me like something less than a man�s book. But I had been raised in the Middle Ages so we can understand how I was so confused. But then someone said to me, why not make the sections as they are. Look at these poems: woman, mother, daughter. Why not do it? And I was very excited. So rather than hiding what the themes are, I let it show--the same with all the other books. I like order, but I don�t try to write on things. I think it�s true for many of us that we write the poems that we are going to like the best on the subjects that we care about the most strongly. Some of those poems don�t work at all. We care so strongly the art can�t handle it. But that�s how it works for me. I look and see. I take the best and then I see what I have. Do I have a form here? Chronology, being such a kind of direct form, is always a favorite with me. I look in wonder at the work of those who don�t organize in a clear way. So many magnificent poets don�t. They don�t think that way. So I guess the secret is just to bear it, that we�re going to be different from each other and that one�s own way is what one has, and one should follow that.

Question: I�m curious about the story that was mentioned in the introduction, about your pact with Satan. Could you tell it?

OLDS: Yes. My first book was called Satan Says. This was long before the new wave of Satanism came in about fifteen years ago. Of course that isn�t going to mean a lot to some of you, to say the new wave came in fifteen years ago. But when I was growing up, Satan had to do with going to church, warnings about sin, and the fear of hell. There was nothing like recreational Satanism or whatever you might call it. It was not that way. So I had a certain confusion about what the voice was I would hear in my mind which would be against pure virtue. Was it the voice I was raised to think of, the voice of Satan tempting me to sin? (It may very well have been when I look back and think about it). So, when I had been writing poems for a long time, and I was thirty, and I had finished my graduate work, I suddenly felt free. I was leaving graduate school with an actual degree, the piece of paper in my backpack and it came to me to call up Satan, which really meant myself, a certain part of my own mind. But I didn�t know psychology then. So I said to Satan, I will give up all I�ve learned at graduate school, not really letting on how much that was, if I can just write my own poems even if they�re bad. And it wasn�t because I thought they�d be good either. I had gotten the idea after thirty years that there was such a thing as human freedom, that there was such a thing as one life given to each of us to use in some unique way. I�d just been trying to get along, get by, hope I wouldn�t go to hell, and act normal so I could have friends. And so that was my pact. The first part of it worked. I don�t remember anything that I learned at Columbia. But I look on it now like how we feel when we have responsibility for another person. You know someone says, will you hold my baby, I�m about to fall over the side of the boat or something. This is very serious when we say yes, and we try to do that. Well, what if we had a responsibility toward our self which was like that? To try and be whoever it was we could be, wanted to be, if it wouldn�t really hurt anyone else. So that�s my story about the day I spoke with Satan.

Question: What poets influenced you and how long did it take you to get your first poem published?

OLDS: Muriel Rukeyser told me that she could have papered the inside and outside of a wastebasket and a whole bathroom with rejection slips if she wanted to. You know those slips that come back saying this is not appropriate for our needs at this time. (I saved some that said things you wouldn�t believe.) I could probably do a living room too. So I don�t remember in years but I remember in stamps. A guy I knew had a son in another country who collected stamps. So every time I sent out my poems and the rejection slip envelope, I would put pretty stamps on it. So I�d get my rejection back and I�d take the stamps to this guy and he would send them to his son. So every time I got rejected there was a gift involved to a child. So I felt I was just fooling them completely.

So many poets come to my mind. I mean when I think of all the poets who have done what Jane Cooper is doing--Audre [Lorde] and Stanley [Kunitz] and the whole list [New York State Poet awardees]. Muriel Rukeyeser has a very special place for me. I took a poetry appreciation class with her where we read aloud to each other--just a wonderful class. So many living poets. The poets at Goldwater Hospital, the poets at NYU whom I work with, the poets whom I read, the Through the Dark Light poets--Janine and Angelo and Kevin. I guess I�d by now have to say everyone in a way--having thought of Muriel and Gwendolyn Brooks and Ruth Stone--that�s a particular generation that for me was just so powerful and important. Thank you.

Sharon Olds, State Poet
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Volume 2No. 3

Summer 1998

Edna O�Brien

Transcript of The Book Show (July 16, 1992)

Alice McDermott

Transcript from Afternoon Seminar - 10/22/92

James Salter

Question & Answer following his reading 12/4/97

Sharon Olds

Afternoon Seminar, January 29, 1998

Sharon Olds

Question & Answer following Reading, January 29, 1998

Volume 2
No. 3